I’ve heard of a lot of traditional companies trying to make the leap into Web 2.0, often with the gracefulness of a rampaging elephant on ice-skates. The internet is quickly becoming the most relevant, and engaging ways to attract the people you want to your product. How can you make use of this “new medium” in a way that provides meaningful results and doesn’t alienate your audience?

Leveraging Experts

Consider this, if you’re a restaurant you wouldn’t trust someone straight off the street to get behind that fryer during a 6 o’clock rush, you’d want to train them first. Likewise, just because you need a web presence doesn’t mean you’re equipped to address it. There are many ways a small business can leverage existing webpages to drive your business online such as amazon, weborder24, yelp etc. Not only can you then offer your product online but make use of companies who build in a Web 2.0 interaction.

Is your Business Web 2.0′able?

Honestly unless you have some witty campaign I doubt people are going to spend their days talking about your ultra soft double ply toilet paper.

Thinking about something a little more likely though say you have a business/stocks magazine that you’re moving online (actually analyzed this specific example for a friend). This company had about 150,000 visitors a day which is huge, but they felt that they needed to modernize and drive more engagement with their customer base. So my friend asked me what could they do to better monetize that using “Web 2.0 principles” all while trying to gain some independence from Google and AdSense.

I had a couple ideas around ways they could do it:

• Tying the price of advertising to the fluctuations in the stock market as most of the ads centered around investment opportunities, and volatility makes people more likely to be more open to these offers.
• Borrow a Reddit type of model which ties company ad placement to user engagement of the ad, and additionally allowing for interaction from the company placing the ad and the consumers clicking on it.

In the end though there was 1 important factor that was very alarming towards their chances of success: their audience. Their audience seemed to be completely apathetic to commenting on their stories, or having a deeper engagement. On their top stories it was a big deal if they had 10-15 comments. Which really makes you wonder if they could possibly get anything off the ground that relied on users.

It’s an Art

Every once in a while I see an ad that draws me in. Something that is humorous, doesn’t hide that it’s an ad, and really embraces it knowing that they have targeted the right person and you are interested in what they are selling.

One of the best examples I have ever seen of this came from a friend who works at Amazon, who found this ad placed on their Facebook page.

The best part about this ad, is how convincing it is. Hell, even I want to see him hired on over at Amazon. The ad directly speaks to his experience given the fact he managed to hit that target so well with my friend. At the same time it’s non-invasive and relies on self selection from the reader.

Conclusion

Having a website is one thing, but without a good grasp on what your offer is, and without the skills needed to comprehend and act upon Web 2.0 opportunities you’re better off just sticking to a straight SEO and AdWords strategy.

Introduction

I would like to take this time to introduce myself. My name is Gustav and I will also be contributing to the content on the website. You can read more about my accomplishments in the about section of the website. I have been in the background performing much of the marketing for the website.

This article will be one of several in a series devoted to Entry Level Blog Marketing. Much it will be advice of how to market your own blog through my own experiences.

There are two strategies that I undertook as part of an effort to market our blog as a useful resource for branding, marketing, and product management: Google Adwords and Web 2.0 social networking websites.

My Experience

I taught myself Google Adwords while I was a GM at a small single-owner operated pizzeria. I was extremely successfully in marketing our product in an incredibly competitive market (there were over two dozen pizzerias in just a 4 mile radius). In just over 3 months, with a budget of just $150/month, I was able to obtain a return on investment of 9:1. I was able to convince the owner that internet marketing is not only inexpensive but also extremely profitable.

Strategy A: Google Adwords

I applied the same strategy to our blog except the budget was significantly less ($50/month) and our blog was competing for ad space on a continent basis (North America was the geographic range) instead of a local basis with the pizzeria. While I was concerned, I decided to move forward because regardless of the outcome it would provide useful knowledge as our blog moves forward and garners attention.

The first setback occurred when many of the keywords that were relevant to our content were highly competitive and expensive. Words such as ‘branding,’ ‘marketing,’ ‘product management,’ ‘product branding,’ etc. had CPC(Cost-per-click) well over $1.00. Such a high CPC was unfeasible with our budget and made little sense when we have no current revenue stream. It wasn’t worth spending over $1.00 when it is highly unlikely each click will result in a conversion (conversion in our case was defined as an active reader of articles)

The second setback occurred when the keywords that were affordable (around $0.10 to $0.20 CPC) didn’t generate enough impressions to expose us to a large enough audience. With around 20 to 30 keywords per Ad Group we were only generating around 300 impressions in 2 weeks. That comes out to just over 20 impressions per day. When you don’t generate enough impressions, your CTR (Click-through-rate) won’t go up and as a result your quality score for those cheaper keywords will start going down resulting in a higher bid price in order to stay on the front page of results. This led me to believe that Google Adwords is not a good place to start for demand gen on a blog.

Strategy B: Web 2.0 Social Networking

Next, I decided to try the Web 2.0 market or social networking blogs that were frequently used around the world. The social networking blogs on my list included Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Mixx, Slashdot, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Sphinn. While all of these social networking blogs differ in the content offering, feature set, and business model, they all have one thing in common: users of any of these social networking sites have an opportunity to submit their own content and have it viewed or rated by other users. This sounded like a great opportunity to get some exposure at no cost.

After about 2 weeks of posting to the above aforementioned websites, we had over a 500% increase in traffic to our blog. This was impressive. With just about 15 minutes of work posting to each of the social networking blogs per day and an additional 15 minutes or so participating in other content and articles, we were obtaining some serious ROI.

It should be noted, however, that social networking sites should not be exclusively used for your own personal gain. The whole purpose of them is to develop an active community of members that post content from a wide variety of sources. If you choose to market your blog through these sites, then make sure you return the chance at free advertising by actively contributing to other articles and posting links to other domains. Many of them also implement auto spambots that detect and flag users who use their service exclusively for personal gain so it would be wise to follow my advice. Also make sure the quality of your content is high. People won’t vote up what you submit or visit your blog if they believe there isn’t content there worth looking at. We at MGMT Now strongly believe the business content and analysis we provide will help others make insightful business decisions.

Conclusion

When deciding between Google Adwords and social networking websites for initial blog marketing the answer is simple: Go the no cost way of Web 2.0 social networking. However, once you have a revenue stream and can increase your monthly budget on Adwords to a competitive level, Adwords will prove to be very helpful. Adsense is a great way to generate advertising revenue, but I will leave that to another part of this series.

Being my first attempt at marketing a blog, it is very exciting to see the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t work from my own personal experiences. I take the time to write these articles because I want my readers to benefit much in the same way I have. I believe that everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit has a right to learn how to make a successful presence on the internet.

Full Disclosure
So this is a bit outside of normal for me. If you’ve taken the time to read the about section of the site you’ll know I’m a Product Manager at Microsoft in the CE group. Given that, I try and stay about as far away from Microsoft topics as I can in a sort of separation of church and state sort of concept. It’s just usually bad news to cross your personal blogging efforts with your company. 

That being said, I try and be somewhat relevant to what is going on in the world, and well Windows 7 on October 22nd 2009 will be one of the biggest stories of the day. So here’s my take which is not in any way representative or endorsed by Microsoft. This is only my own personal view as a user of the product, a consumer, and someone who loved the new advertisements.

A New Breed of Advertising

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Windows 7 arrives amid a mix of the A-Team, a little girl, ponies, kittens, and awesomeness. Commercials dedicated to the fun, often random, whimsical desires of a diverse group of customers; who use their machines in any way but what is predictable. Finally the marketing for this product has caught up with the internet age; where people watch dogs on skateboards via YouTube or unfortunate pictures of failure at failblog and peopleofwalmart.

A Product That Fits
I’ve been using Windows 7 since it came out in beta and have loved every minute of it. One of my earliest memories of a Windows 7 “WOW!” moment came when I had a fellow Product Manager who wanted to get a second screen working with his Lenovo laptop so he could keep an eye on March Madness (NCAA Basketball) while he continued to work on his other screen.

Here’s how the scene played out (almost commercial like in its ability to pitch a product feature):

PM 1: He guys do you know anything about ATI drivers? I really need to figure out how to get this second monitor working, I’m missing the Michigan game.
PM2:Oh you actually don’t want to go to ATI’s website its more of a Lenovo issue you should head to their website, and look through the available drivers for that device.
Me:Or you could just click the Windows Update button, the Windows team understood how bad of an experience it could be to have to jump around all over the internet, and worked with their partners to get the drivers delivered via a Microsoft download.
PM2: Oh yeah…….
PM1: Let me try that.
<90 seconds pass> and PM 1 comes rushing back to my office.
PM1: It’s working and I can watch the game now. That was great.

The best thing I can say about the product is it works around your life. There are lots of features designed to make the places you were already going to that much easier to reach. That’s why I love the random and totally bizarre commercials with a little 5 year old rocking out on her PC, because that’s honestly how the product feels to me. 

Conclusion
As for the marketing, I love the little girl she humanizes this giant product, sells the right message (it really is that easy), and looks like she’s having a ton of fun doing it. Then you throw in some A-Team song and I’m all about it. Sure the ad is random but so are consumers, and that’s who needs to cuddle up with Windows 7.

Only concern I have with the advertising is I’d like to see more features outlined. That has been one of the showcases of the iPhone commercials which have been so successful. They show you how to use the product in a 30 second spot every time, and it’s something Microsoft should also be doing.

Stopped for gas and saw this sign. It’s interesting seeing these kinds of outside the box marketing. They really break through all the noise in the every day world that is packed with marketing.

My only question is if anyone would be offended by it or not?

Good marketing pushes the boundaries, bad marketing goes past them; but who defines what the boundary is?